OMR – the Cinderella service

It’s easy to dismiss OMR (or Optical Mark Recognition) as technologically outdated – surely everything can be done online now?

But don’t dismiss OMR as it can still be very useful. In the case of CAA (Computer Assisted Assessment), it’s a relatively easy, low-cost approach to automating the process of marking large numbers of exam papers. For this reason, it continues to be a popular approach here at Loughborough.

My colleague Tim Baseley who supports OMR on campus has just passed on the following information about use of OMR in Semester 2:

• 51 exams were delivered via OMR.
• This represents a 2% increase over Semester 2 2010.
• The total numbers of individual candidate papers printed was 6954.

From an ‘efficiency and effectiveness’ perspective, the saving in academic marking workload this makes possible is tremendous. For more on this aspect of OMR see my previous post on this subject.

Tim and colleagues are currently planning to move Module feedback forms to Remark OMR. This should improve scalability, flexibility and reporting whilst reducing overall costs and administration/processing time.